The Baseball Writers Association of America has been making its view of the steroid era in the major leagues quite clear over the past several years, with Mark McGwire and his 583 career home runs never garnering even as much as 25 percent of the Hall of Fame vote. Now, the time has come to see what the Hall’s expansion era committee thinks of the man who wrote McGwire’s name on a lineup card every day.

Tony La Russa managed McGwire with the Oakland A’s from 1986-95, and with the St. Louis Cardinals from Big Mac’s trade there in 1997 until the end of his career in 2001. The only other manager McGwire ever played for was Art Howe, for a year and a half in Oakland. McGwire and La Russa are joined at the hip in history, not least of all because of La Russa’s years of vocal support for the slugger in the face of performance-enhancing drug allegations.

It was in St. Louis that McGwire’s use of androstenedione came to light, but long before that, La Russa managed the A’s when McGwire and Jose Canseco led the Bash Brothers to three straight American League pennants. In 1989, Oakland swept the San Francisco Giants to make La Russa a World Series-winning manager, a feat that he repeated in St. Louis in 2006 and 2011.

Those last two championships came after Major League Baseball instituted a testing and suspension program for performance-enhancing drugs, which should favor La Russa’s candidacy for Cooperstown. Really, though, it should not matter. Even if La Russa knew from the start what Canseco and McGwire and others were doing, even if he stood in the way of drug use coming to light, even if he did more than turn a blind eye to his players’ chemical enhancements, it should not disqualify him from getting a plaque.

Ultimately, the responsibility for drug use in baseball falls on the drug users. There are enablers, certainly, and there is little argument against putting that label on La Russa, but it’s not relevant to whether or not he is a Hall of Fame manager. That much should be clear from the fact that all of McGwire’s home runs still count, no asterisks have been applied to any records from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, and that nobody so much as blinks at Joe Torre’s name being on the expansion era committee’s ballot when Torre’s greatest success — four World Series wins in five years from 1996-2000 with the Yankees — came courtesy of rosters loaded with players who were fingered in the Mitchell Report.

La Russa was Manager of the Year four times in his career, compiled a 2,728-2,365 record with the White Sox, A’s, and Cardinals, leading those teams to a dozen first-place finishes, six pennants and three World Series titles. That is a Hall of Fame kind of resume for someone who did absolutely nothing to incur punishment from Major League Baseball that would invalidate his achievements.

That also does not make La Russa a shoo-in, because the expansion era committee has several other worthy candidates to consider, starting with the late Marvin Miller, whose work with the MLB Players Association did more to change the face of baseball than any person ever has on the field. There is also Torre, with more rings on his fingers than La Russa, and Bobby Cox, the skipper of baseball’s most dominant team for the entire decade of the 1990s with the Atlanta Braves. Dave Concepcion, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Billy Martin, Dave Parker, Dan Quisenberry, Ted Simmons, and George Steinbrenner also are on the ballot, all with compelling arguments to be made in their favor, and you can be sure that the expansion era committee is not about to put a dozen new members into the Hall of Fame – and that’s before the BBWAA considers a ballot that includes newcomers Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Mike Mussina and Frank Thomas, in addition to scandalized holdovers Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa. Throw in Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Edgar Martinez, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines and Larry Walker, and it’s a lot to sort through.

The expansion committee cannot worry too much about what the BBWAA will do, other than to know that with this much of a talent logjam on the writers’ ballot, we’re probably about 20-30 years from having a Hall of Fame committee evaluate turn of the millennium players. La Russa, if he’s not in Cooperstown by then, would be back up for consideration for sure.

It also would not be unprecedented for a Hall of Fame manager to have to wait a long time for induction. Tommy Lasorda got into the Hall in 1997 after having managed his last game in 1996, but he is the exception rather than the rule. Of the 10 managers to gain entry to the Hall in the last three decades, only Lasorda, Sparky Anderson (five years), and Walter Alston (seven years) had less than 10 years between their final season as a skipper and their moment at the podium in upstate New York. Dick Williams and Whitey Herzog, two of the last three managers inducted, each waited 20 years. Billy Southworth, inducted with Williams in 2008, last managed in 1951, and was dead for almost 40 years before he got his historical due.

Leo Durocher also was dead before his induction as a manager, in 1994, 21 years after his last game on the bench. Of the 20 managers in the Hall it is The Lip who most clearly shows why La Russa’s connection to drug-using players should not be held against him. While it is the players who bear the responsibility for their chemical peccadillos, in 1951, Durocher had one of his crowning achievements as a manager, leading the New York Giants back from 13½ games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers in August to win the pennant in a three-game tiebreaker playoff on Bobby Thomson’s legendary home run. That summer, Durocher was the architect of an elaborate sign-stealing system that included a spare player with a telescope in the clubhouse in center field at the Polo Grounds and an electronic signaling system to the Giants’ bullpen.

The revelations of the Giants’ espionage no more disqualify Durocher from his place in history than juiced ballplayers should deny La Russa his due. History is not as neat and tidy as some would like it to be, but that does not mean sweeping it all away.